As a young transfer student at Barnard College, Emily Anne Epstein just wanted to make friends — and she decided the way she’d do that was through photography. She threw herself into attending clubs and meeting new people, using her camera as a way to initiate conversations and learn about others.

Though she was an English lit major, the camera skills Emily picked up as an undergrad led to a job in photojournalism, covering breaking news across New York City. Later, after observing journalists on the job, she started honing her narrative skills and telling stories through prose instead of pictures. 

“I got the storytelling bug,” Emily recalls. “I wanted to move up the ranks and tell story after story, meet person after person, really expand my knowledge of the world and the people in it, how it’s organized and what the schemas of power are.” 

Emily eventually became an editor-in-chief, working for The Atlantic, Bustle, and Narcity Media and racking up bylines with outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She was happy in journalism until she heard rumors of a more balanced quality of life in the tech world and discovered content marketing.

Today, as Director of Content at Sigma, Emily applies the skillset she gained in photojournalism and journalism to selling products — a big shift for someone who spent so long in an industry where content is the product.

Building a Strong Internal Ad Network at Sigma

One of Emily’s first tasks at Sigma was to “fix” the company’s SEO content and boost traffic. As she was doing her initial research, she spotted a glaring issue.

“We can build all the SEO traffic, but a CTA at the bottom of the piece and a ‘View Demo’ at the top of the article is not going to convert people,” she states. “We need to have different CTAs for different moments in the user journey.”

However, manually updating calls to action (CTAs) every time a new launch, webinar or ebook happened also wasn’t going to work. How, then, could Sigma create a relevant user journey with appropriate CTAs? 

By adopting a tactic often seen in newspapers and magazines — internal ads.

Dynamic MoFu and BoFu ads 

“That’s when I contacted our Head of Web, Pete Hawkes, about the idea of building our own internal ad network,” Emily says. “It would be a dynamic way for us to serve middle-of-funnel [MoFu] and bottom-of-funnel [BoFu] CTAs throughout our entire content library so we could identify where users were in their journeys and the next step.”

Here are two internal ad examples similar to what you might see sprinkled throughout the Sigma blog:

 

SEO articles can be pretty long, so these ads mimic what you would see in a major media publication and break up the scroll for readers. The ads direct people to more information, but they also connect SEO content with lead-gen content. 

“Maybe these people have clicked on several articles,” Emily explains, “or maybe they’ve spent several minutes in a session. I wanted to give them an opportunity to share their email and connect with us. In content marketing, the first thing we do is capture someone’s attention, then their email and then, eventually, once we’ve captured enough of their time, we can capture their business. You have to build the funnel and make sure there’s an easy path for them to move down.” 

Sigma cycles through new ads each month, depending on what’s going on in the company. Coming from her background in media, this approach made complete sense to Emily. Companies pay for ads on other platforms all the time — why not advertise to people who are already showing active interest in the brand? 

Results

There’s a clear before-and-after picture in the data below, illustrating successful results from the internal ad campaign. 

(Image Credit: Ayonika Bose, Analytics Engineer)

Prior to the ads, people spent about a minute and a half per session and visited 1.2 pages; after five months of runway, those numbers went up to three minutes per session and 1.35 pages per visit. 

That’s a 118% increase for time spent per session and a 13% increase for pages per session! 

“The internal ads have a measurable impact on the time people spend, and we’ve seen bottom line ROI numbers as well,” Emily says. “We’re influencing more pipeline because we’re capturing people the moment they’re engaging with us. We’re making it much easier for them to become our customers.” 

Collaboration Between Content and Web Teams — and Beyond

Emily credits the success of this initiative to the collaboration between her team and Pete Hawkes’s web team. Particularly in the B2B SaaS world, she finds this sort of relationship to be sorely lacking, with leaders focusing more on metrics like readability than page optimization and hard ROI figures. 

“I am judged on what I’m delivering for the business, but I need to work with the web team to make sure everything is optimized so the business benefits, not just my program,” Emily emphasizes. 

This line of thinking extends to teams across the company, too. Content leaders work across many different departments that use content in very different ways, so it’s important to understand what metrics others are being judged on so we understand the big picture. 

“It’s not a goal for me to increase pages per session, but that’s what my colleagues are evaluated on,” Emily says. “If I can build a system that works for both of us, that’s a win. Being a leader means figuring out how to add value beyond your own goals and creating strategies that serve the whole organization, not just one team.”